Meta heuristics for the orienteering problem

This paper presents two meta-heuristic techniques, ant colony optimization and tabu search, for the orienteering problem, a general version of the well-known traveling salesman problem with many relevant applications in industry. Both algorithms are compared to other heuristics in the literature. Results on 67 test problems show that the ant colony optimization method and tabu search method perform as well, or better, in all cases and do so at competitive computational cost.